At Inception Security, our mission is to equip organizations with the knowledge and tools to combat advanced cyber threats. As experts in threat intelligence and incident response, we've conducted extensive research into numerous APT campaigns. This includes uncovering the NightEagle group—also tracked as APT-Q-95—for its precision and sophistication. Through our proprietary analysis and forensic investigations, we've determined that this North American-aligned APT has been l

Top Reasons Why Incident Response Table Top Exercises Are Important In today's digital world, cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, frequent, and disruptive than ever before. As a result, organizations must take a proactive approach to manage cyber risks, and incident response (IR) tabletop exercises are a crucial part of that approach. In this blog post, we will explore why IR tabletop exercises are essential for businesses and organizations and how Inception Securi

In recent months, we have seen a surge in attacks targeting Exchange Servers. These attacks have been made possible by exploiting the CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082. This post will delve into the details of these vulnerabilities and how attackers exploit them to gain access to Exchange Servers. Exploiting CVE-2022-41040: The first step in this attack is exploiting CVE-2022-41040 to gain access to the PowerShell API endpoint of the Exchange Server. This vulnerability arises

The Play ransomware group has been making headlines recently due to its use of a new method to exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange. Dubbed the ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-41080 and CVE-2022-41082), this method exploits the Outlook Web Application frontend to reach the Powershell remoting service in Exchange. Researchers at CrowdStrike discovered this method while investigating recent Play ransomware incidents and dubbed it OWASSRF. The Play group is a ne

Let's talk about remote assistance tools! As you would expect, a remote assistance tool is used to assist end-users from a remote location. These tools are great and are widely used by helpdesk and IT support staff to help users with various workstations issues. If allowed within the settings of the host computer, the remote user can also share control of the host computer, opening files, accessing information, and inputting data by mouse and keyboard. This is extremely helpf

We have recently observed threat actors evolving their procedures in light of Microsoft disabling macros by default in office documents. This new technique would allow threat actors to continue to bypass security controls to infect one or more hosts in an environment. In light of the latest Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, we will likely see broad adoption of macro-less infected documents that will lead to many organizations getting hacked. While Microsoft has shared mitigat

What are Profile Lists? Windows keeps track of user-profiles and their locations in the registry. The profile location is stored under the key below: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList This registry key contains one subkey for each user profile on a Windows machine. Inside of each of these subkeys is a registry value called ProfileImagePath that holds that user's profile path. You can also see when each subkey was last written and other details abou

CVE-2022-1388 is a critical CVE (CVSS 9.8) in F5 Networks’ BIG-IP solution management interface. This CVE will allow threat actors to bypass F5’s iControl REST authentication to gain remote code execution. This is not the first significant vulnerability we have seen with the BIG-IP platform. In 2021, security practitioners worldwide observed attacks against the iControl REST API as well. This was tracked as CVE-2021-22986. The vulnerability is what security researchers call a

Phishing attacks remain the number one technique used in cyberattacks. Some of the most common phishing attacks leveraged attachments to facilitate the initial infection chain. We disproportionally see Microsoft Office documents and PDF files used to embed the malicious code as far as the attachments themselves go. When we say Microsoft Office documents, we refer to files created by the Microsoft Office suite such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Historically we wou

A critical vulnerability CVE-2022-22965 (Spring4Shell or SpringShell) was found on March 29, 2022, in an open-source Java framework while testing named Spring. This vulnerability allows the attacker to execute arbitrary code on a web server. Spring is a widely used framework, so this vulnerability can be highly lethal. The data binding feature of Spring Framework was used to bind data in an HTTP request to some of the objects being used in an application. The vulnerability ex

On patch Tuesday, April 12, 2022, Microsoft released patches for CVE-2022-26809. A vulnerability that is a zero-click exploit targeting Microsoft RPC services. As of right now, there is not a PoC out in the wild. However, the scanning for the vulnerability has increased. Based on the impact of this vulnerability, it is likely that there will be a PoC in the wild soon. Patch your servers now before the PoC come out. What is RPC? The Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service is used

As we look across the landscape, we see that cyberattacks continue to succeed in all business sectors. In the cases we have observed, the cyberattack leveraged weak security controls and, as a result, could have been prevented by organizations adopting security best practices. A new study shows that ransomware, phishing, social engineering, denial of service (DoS) attacks, and the business fallout of a data breach rank as the top concerns of global organizations. The recently

Considering today's attack surface's massive and hyper-dimensional nature, we begin to see how challenging it is to manage this attack surface in a modern enterprise. The risk surface of the enterprise is constantly expanding. Threats are finding their way into enterprises, constantly morphing and adapting to network defenses. It is thus a daunting task to bring the vast scope of an organization's enterprise attack surface into focus. Many security leaders lack awareness of a

Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) A critical task for most organizations has become setting up advanced threat protection as cyberattacks have skyrocketed and become more sophisticated. Starting with a robust endpoint detection and response system is the first step in this process. Detecting and responding to endpoint threats, also known as EDR, is a cybersecurity process that gathers and analyses data collected by endpoints, usually workstations and servers. As a result, s

QBot, also known as Qakbot or pinkslipbot, is an information stealer that has been active since 2007. It is malware software that can monitor the browser's activities and lots of information on the victim's computer. It is also known as a banking trojan capable of stealing finance-related data from the infected device and loader by using c2 servers to target payload and downloads. Other important information that QBot can steal from a system are: Name of the account City Coun

Pandora ransomware came into the spotlight in March of 2022 after posting some high-profile victims on its leak site. The ransomware group announced its first victim on Feb 21st, 2022. Their biggest victim was Denso, a car parts manufacturer. After an attack on one of its offices in Germany, Denso confirmed that cybercriminals leaked stolen, classified information from the Japan-based car-components manufacturer. Pandora claims to have exfiltrated 1TB of data from Denso. So w

Ransomware is the type of suspicious software Cybercriminals use to encrypt your data, rendering it unusable. As a result, the attackers demand the ransom money to release the victim's data. Once the attack is successfully executed, the victim has to pay money to access their data, but paying to the attacker is not a good decision because once they produce, the attacker knows they can get money from the victim, so they attack again and again. If you don't pay, you'll lose mo

Incident response is a method for dealing with various forms of security events, cyber threats, and data breaches in an organized manner. The goal of the incident response approach is to identify, contain, eradicate, and reduce the cost of a cyberattack or live event. To be prepared for a future attack, a well-built incident response (IR) plan will be essential in limiting the potential business impacts of an incident. It is critical to address security breaches quickly and e

Just over a month after the details of the initial Apache Log4j vulnerability surfaced, attacks against infrastructure running vulnerable versions of the application are continuing, including a recent furry of attacks targeting VMware Horizon servers by an unidentified threat actor group. VMware Horizon server versions 8.x and 7.x are vulnerable to two of the Log4j vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046), and officials with the UK’s National Health Service Digital

In Microsoft Exchange, the three known vulnerabilities that threat actors use to get initial access are often referred to collectively as Proxyshells. These three known vulnerabilities are CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021- 31207. The attackers use these three vulnerabilities by bypassing the authentication and running a remote code as a privileged user. Microsoft has classified the Proxyshell vulnerabilities as critical. However, the proxyshell vulnerability is re